Annapolis-based cybersecurity company Netography raises massive $45 million Series A

Annapolis-based cybersecurity company Netography raised $45 million in a Series A round, the company is announcing Monday. It’s a standout dollar amount for a Series A round, sigalling confidence among investors in the experienced cybersecurity entrepreneurs that lead the team, as well as the product.

The round was led by two venture capital firms: San Francisco-based Bessemer Venture Partners and cybersecurity-focused SYN Ventures. Existing investors in the company, including Andreessen Horowitz, Mango Capital, Harpoon Ventures, and Wing Venture Capital, also participated. With the growth capital, the primary focus is hiring.

The round comes just a couple months after network security leader Martin Roesch joined the company as CEO. He invented the open source intrusion prevention system Snort and served as CTO at Columbia-based Sourcefire through its $2.7 billion acquisition by Cisco in 2013. With funding and the product deployed to customers, the company is ready to start building out its team.

“We’re going to start growing the company in every dimension,” Roesch told Technical.ly.

Founded in 2018 by DDoS security pioneers Barrett Lyon and Dan Murphy, Netography makes a SaaS platform that provides network detection and response for large organizations and businesses. It aims to secure the “atomized network,” said Roesch,

Fifteen years ago, network security meant both securing the network and servers that were in company-owned buildings. Now, the data that moves through these networks is increasingly in distributed environments via the cloud, as well as the remote work locations where employees are increasingly based during the pandemic. Each of these environments has brought different kinds of security technologies, but they’re not designed to work together, and don’t have interfaces to help security pros understand what’s happening.

“We’re attacking that problem at the same time as we attack the fundamental problem of people attacking networks across the internet,” Roesch said.

Netography’s platform is designed to bring these diffuse technologies together with tech that secures any environment, and is designed to make things easier for businesses. The cloud-based system takes in metadata from the different environments and provides both visibility and detection of attacks. Roesch said it can also be deployed within an hour or two, which is faster than most security technology.

“Organizations have been struggling to retain visibility and control as the network evolves and slowly goes dark through the broad adoption of encryption,” said Patrick Heim, managing partner at SYN Ventures, in a statement. He will join the company’s board. “The Netography team has cracked the code on how to deliver next-gen network security capabilities that overcome these challenges. ”

We're going to start growing the company in every dimension.

The round’s close comes a few months after Roesch joined the company this fall. He said it has since brought on bigger customers that, by adding more data, has also helped to give the product reach and capabilities. Along with the funding, the company is bringing on two fellow Cisco and Sourcefire veterans: Dan Ramaswami as VP of field engineering and Ben Holladay as chief revenue officer.

Further hiring is expected to bring the team of 11 to about 50 people over the next year. The growth capital will allow the company to hire to build out each part of the organization, including engineering, product development, product management, marketing, sales and demand generation. It is looking to grow its team of technologists to continue building the product for scale.

“There are a few pieces to the puzzle,” Roesch said. “You need to be able to build the platforms and backends to be able to analyze all of the data, but then you also need the people who know what data to look for and how to analyze it to look for attackers and signs of attack as well as to marshal responses. We’re looking across the board for talented engineers who know the spaces we’re operating in, particularly around cloud and security.”

As it hires in an increasingly remote world, the company isn’t limiting its hiring to a geographic area. Yet it’s still planning to stand up a base in Annapolis, given the proximity to talent in the area coming out of federal government institutions like those at Fort Meade, and Roesch’s past success building a company in Maryland.

“Having a place where we can all come together is really important, so that’s why we’re looking to put up a headquarters here,” he said.